Re: Application servers / job priorities ?

"Lee" <lreilly@lanl.gov> wrote in message news:3BD6CE59.5BA8537B@lanl.gov... > I am developing a portal that will allow users to perform various > calculations on their data sets. These calculations (handled by C / > Fortran programs) will be run as external processes (and may take up to > a few hours to complete). I am wondering if there is something that I > can use (either in PHP or as another external process) to act as an > application server i.e. allow multiple users to submit requests for > calculations, but place these requests in a queue - perhaps associating > each calculation with a priority, and handling each request as > appropriate. > > Can anyone suggest anything that may faciliate this? Any links/hints > would be greatly appreciated. Thanks very much in advance. I would separate this into front end/back end systems. The front end lets people sign in, submit a data set, request an operation, and set the priority. It should let them view job status and reorder/reprioritize the jobs. All this information gets stored in a database (three tables - one for users, one for data sets, one for jobs). The back end runs independantly - repeatedly queries the database to find the next most urgent job and spawns a program to do the calculation. Play with the number of concurrent threads per processor to find a good balance to keep the system busy but not bottlenecked. This set-up would make it very easy to distribute the calculations across multiple systems to speed things up.